The reason is pretty simple. It's too much trouble to bother certifying every specific drive that you could use out there with a market that quickly changes like hard drives. These things are commodities anyway. Only in the biggest data center applications do vendors care which drives go into these things. Yes, there are some issues occasionally...the earliest 1.5 TB drives were problematic in RAIDs and not every older RAID supports advanced formatting (4K blocks). But most of the time, if they mean "enterprise quality", it means find you a 7200 RPM drive from a major vendor that you like and proceed.

I just want to know since we will be buying replacement drives for swapping at the same time, and they all need to match.

Then a Thunerbolt-FW adaptor takes care of the other, less common uses of FW (scanners, audio gear, etc), and Apple starts shipping computers with only Tunderbolt and USB. USB will likely always have a price advantage for things like keyboards, mice, and even the smaller thumb drives. So I don't see USB being dropped anytime soon.

I don't think Thunderbolt proponents are saying that USB will be dropped. There is no point for human interface devices to be directly on a Thunderbolt bus, except maybe through a hub adapter. I'm guessing that thumb drives won't be certified because devices are supposed to have a pass-through to be a legit Thunderbolt device.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Right_said_fred

I have to assume a touch of sarcasm, I don't think its sad, or regrettable, merely inconvenient

More or less. I don't understand how the store's search engine can perform so poorly at indexing its products, especially when Apple is starting to ramp up a much more ambitious internet platform soon. I've seen better web store indexing from much lower profile web stores. Also, there have been times that I didn't think Apple sold an item because it didn't show on a search within the store, when it was the search utility that didn't index the store properly.

More or less. I don't understand how the store's search engine can perform so poorly at indexing its products, especially when Apple is starting to ramp up a much more ambitious internet platform soon. I've seen better web store indexing from much lower profile web stores. Also, there have been times that I didn't think Apple sold an item because it didn't show on a search within the store, when it was the search utility that didn't index the store properly.

The only way to see an Apple part number is to add it to your cart then view the cart.
Lame!

Wonder if apple is giving them like $5/unit to keep it out...I would if I were trying to sell Apple brand interface cables that aren't available widely from other vendors.

Unlikely. This isn't 1997...Apple doesn't need the money that badly. More likely Apple is the only vendor that actually has completed cables manufactured right now and rather than hold up shipment of a $1400-$2000 box for a $50 cable, they are just relying on the customer to buy it through Apple. As cable manufacturers catch up, it's likely you'll see them and other vendors include them like they do Firewire and USB cables now.

Not in the market for Thunderbolt yet...but I am glad so many are cause the early adopters that will spend $50 on a cable pay the R and D costs for guys like me who cant quite afford to be on the cutting edge...that said, even for cutting edge tech that cable should be no more than $25...Apple must model their cable business after monster...not a bad plan for stock holders

Price. Not saying thunderbolt wont work, it will for devices that neally needs it. But it wont be mainstream because of prices. USB 3.0 is backward compatiple AND cheap and still very fast.

IF seagates come up with a Thunderbold adapter, I will be more than curious to see how much it cost. Currently firewire adapters are 25$. imo you are better off buying an USB 3.0 drive and get the firewire adapter for 25$ than buying a seagate "mac" drive which are 40% more expensive and only include USB 2.0 and firewire adapters. With the USB 3.0 drive, you get USB 2.0/3.0 and for 25$ a firewire adapter, for a total cost that less expensive than a "mac" drive. And you will be able to upgrade to thunderbold when the adapter comes out.

1. A Mac Mini, strapped to one of these boxes ***is*** your Mac Pro.
2. Thunderbolt is effectively 4 10Gbps channels. The DisplayPort data is not treated specially compared to non-DisplayPort data, and it is not mandatory that you have an external monitor on the cable. Has anyone priced a dual-port 10Gbps NIC lately? They aren't exactly cheap. EVERY Thunderbolt Mac now has the equivalent of a dual-port 10Gbps NIC built in.

Search Amazon for "2CH 10GB Pcie Copper Nic Oneconnect No Cables" and you'll see it priced at $536.73. And the cables? $130 for each channel. Remember that Thunderbolt is, effectively TWO channels of 10GbE. Apple is ***subsidizing*** the cable price, not trying to rip anyone off!

Are you really complaining about a $50 cable? Try $260. Perhaps you need to be in the industry to realize how mind-boggling and bleeding edge Thunderbolt is!

I liked everything you said except this. Sure, a Mac Mini w/Thunderbolt is way cool. Upgrade it to Sandy Bridge and toss in some quad core processors as a BTO option and you have a modern day SE/30. But I still think most pros wouldn't give up 6-12 cores of Xeon badness, not to mention the data throughout of that system.

A smaller Mac Pro would be pretty cool though. After all, how many PCI slots do you really need these days?

While I think $49 for a 6' Thunderbolt cable is ridiculous, I also think that Apple is pricing them that way because they can. The prices will come down when more accessory companies make and sell their own, and when peripheral makers include them in the box. Right now it's the scarcity that's letting Apple get away with the high price. Though even after others get in the game, it's highly likely that Apple will still charge "premium" prices.

I remember back when Apple had their extended keyboard for something like $129, while you could buy a fully functional third party keyboard for $29 or even less.

Target disk mode is actually quite useful as a support tool in enterprise and education environments. Just because you won't use it doesn't mean it's useless.

Just to be clear, I didn't say I won't use it and I didn't say it was useless. But it is nice to hear that it has more immediate uses, though I'd like to hear more about it. I usually just boot from an external hard drive for my own tech support. On a given computer of mine, target disk mode is used two or three times in the entire life of the machine.

I liked everything you said except this. Sure, a Mac Mini w/Thunderbolt is way cool. Upgrade it to Sandy Bridge and toss in some quad core processors as a BTO option and you have a modern day SE/30. But I still think most pros wouldn't give up 6-12 cores of Xeon badness, not to mention the data throughout of that system.

A smaller Mac Pro would be pretty cool though. After all, how many PCI slots do you really need these days?

Okay. I was a bit overzealous. A Mac Mini (once the Sandy Bridge version is released) + a hot-swap drive bay over TB is a Mac Pro minus the dual processor goodness available in a Mac Pro. However, many Mac Pro's don't have 8 or 12 cores. For that matter, many people with Mac Pro's have never added a PCI adapter.

Glad to get called on something by an intelligent and respected poster. I've been reading MacRumors lately; forgot to raise my standards on the way back.

But I still think most pros wouldn't give up 6-12 cores of Xeon badness, not to mention the data throughout of that system.

You are correct sir. When we purchased our MacPros for Final Cut systems we always got the fastest one available. If you don't do this software advances will overwhelm the hardware too quickly. We still have two original 4 core Mac Pros, one running FCP 7 and one running Media Composer. Both work just fine. The 4 core Final Cut system can even handle true uncompressed HD (not 444) which is something the Avids have never done.

Looking forward to the rumored 16 core Mac Pros. Of course I would have to put FCP 7 on it

I really don't see the need to use my 2011 imac as a monitor for my 2011 macbook pro. I would however, love to see a thunderbolt type converter cable that lets me use my imac as a monitor for my gaming pc (if that's even possible).

I was just going ask if anyone knew which drives Promise uses in these RAIDs. Is that it?

Quote:

Originally Posted by mstone

I just want to know since we will be buying replacement drives for swapping at the same time, and they all need to match.

As people may have mentioned, the WD Green is from the Time Capsule.

For the Promise RAIDs it doesn't seem to specify the drives other than it is 7200rpm (the WD Caviar Greens don't specify the RPM from what I can find, people seem to think it is less than the 7200rpm standard).

I suppose you could pull the drives out when you purchase one and see what it comes with.

Not the best solution, I know. Let alone all this discussion about "enterprise class" which I am not going to rehash. I would be curious though what "class" of drives Promise RAIDs claim to be.

"All of the available Pegasus systems ship with 7200RPM 3.5" hard drives, although Promise mentioned that we will may see SSD enabled configurations in the future. The 12TB R6 we received uses six Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 2TB drives (HDS723020BLA642) in a 9.7TB RAID-5 configuration. The 7K3000 spins its four platters at 7200RPM and buffers data with a 64MB on-board cache. The drive has a 6Gbps SATA interface although the Pegasus R4/R6 supports SAS drives as well. All of the Pegasus devices ship in RAID 5 however they do support RAID-0/1/5/50/6/10."

I'm looking forward to AnandTech's more in depth reviews in time to come. Anand is a true hard drive/SSD fanatic and I expect a thorough review.

For the Promise RAIDs it doesn't seem to specify the drives other than it is 7200rpm (the WD Caviar Greens don't specify the RPM from what I can find, people seem to think it is less than the 7200rpm standard).

They don't say what it is, but they admit the greens are closer to 5400 RPM in some of the articles.

Quote:

I suppose you could pull the drives out when you purchase one and see what it comes with.

You're paying a bit of a premium for whatever drives are in there, to remove them right away is silly, unless you plan to buy the models with 1TB drives and stuff 3TB drives in there.

I really don't see the need to use my 2011 imac as a monitor for my 2011 macbook pro. I would however, love to see a thunderbolt type converter cable that lets me use my imac as a monitor for my gaming pc (if that's even possible).

It was possible with the 2010 27" iMac, but by all reports I've seen, that went away when they put in the Thunderbolt ports.

I liked everything you said except this. Sure, a Mac Mini w/Thunderbolt is way cool. Upgrade it to Sandy Bridge and toss in some quad core processors as a BTO option and you have a modern day SE/30. But I still think most pros wouldn't give up 6-12 cores of Xeon badness, not to mention the data throughout of that system.

A smaller Mac Pro would be pretty cool though. After all, how many PCI slots do you really need these days?

What I think most people need from a Mac Pro is the drive bays more than the PCI slots (I could be wrong). And TB I think will solve that problem for a lot of people. Mac mini or MBP or ??? But there are also people who want a high-end graphics card that will require a Mac Pro or will need to leverage the (yet-to-be-developed) Thunderbolt-based graphics cards.

Quote:

Originally Posted by planetWC

Wonder when there will be Thunderbolt cards for older Mac Pros?

I remember reading that this isn't doable. The Thunderbolt controller chip needs to be physically connected to the actual bus, not just a PCI slot downstream. A motherboard will either natively support Thunderbolt or it won't, but there won't be add-on cards.

What I think most people need from a Mac Pro is the drive bays more than the PCI slots (I could be wrong). And TB I think will solve that problem for a lot of people. Mac mini or MBP or ??? But there are also people who want a high-end graphics card that will require a Mac Pro or will need to leverage the (yet-to-be-developed) Thunderbolt-based graphics cards.

I remember reading that this isn't doable. The Thunderbolt controller chip needs to be physically connected to the actual bus, not just a PCI slot downstream. A motherboard will either natively support Thunderbolt or it won't, but there won't be add-on cards.

I think it's more like you have to have the Thunderbolt chipset support built into the motherboard, then you should (warning: conjecture ahead) be able to drive an additional video card across the Thunderbolt bus (which is really a type of extended/external PCI bus) or drive a standard video card from the existing PCI slot.

What you won't be able to do is install some type Thunderbolt card in a PCI slot on your Mac Pro.

Thanks for posting that. That article is more informative on the subject than anything else I've seen so far.

Quote:

I think it's more like you have to have the Thunderbolt chipset support built into the motherboard, then you should (warning: conjecture ahead) be able to drive an additional video card across the Thunderbolt bus (which is really a type of extended/external PCI bus) or drive a standard video card from the existing PCI slot.

What you won't be able to do is install some type Thunderbolt card in a PCI slot on your Mac Pro.

It seems to me that a video card with a Thunderbolt plug is feasible within the unusual requirements of the technology, the video card has access to PCIe and the video output of the graphics chip. Then the way add a second or third Thunderbolt jack is to get another hybrid I/O and graphics board. It seems a bit ridiculous though, if you just need more I/O, then you're buying a graphics chip that you don't really need. But if you have a legacy Mac Pro, this might be an option, provided that the graphics chip is supported by Apple in the particular machine in question.

You're paying a bit of a premium for whatever drives are in there, to remove them right away is silly, unless you plan to buy the models with 1TB drives and stuff 3TB drives in there.

Err... What I said was in response to the user that was wondering what drives to buy if the original drives went down, since it is best to use matched drives in RAIDs. Hence I mentioned, one could just pull it out to see what drives they were using, and then put it back of course.

Anyway initial reviews show it shipping with Hitachi Deskstar drives, with specific models etc as I posted earlier:

"All of the available Pegasus systems ship with 7200RPM 3.5" hard drives, although Promise mentioned that we will may see SSD enabled configurations in the future. The 12TB R6 we received uses six Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 2TB drives (HDS723020BLA642) in a 9.7TB RAID-5 configuration. The 7K3000 spins its four platters at 7200RPM and buffers data with a 64MB on-board cache. The drive has a 6Gbps SATA interface although the Pegasus R4/R6 supports SAS drives as well. All of the Pegasus devices ship in RAID 5 however they do support RAID-0/1/5/50/6/10."

Err... What I said was in response to the user that was wondering what drives to buy if the original drives went down, since it is best to use matched drives in RAIDs. Hence I mentioned, one could just pull it out to see what drives they were using, and then put it back of course.

You're right, I should have corrected my statement once I realized my misunderstanding of the context.